Rasool’s Reviews > The Woman in the Dunes > Status Update

Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn welled up in him. They might as well lick each other’s wounds. But they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away.

Certain kinds of mice that are said to drink their own urine in place of water, or insects that feed on spoiled meat, or nomadic tribes who know only the one-way ticket at best, can adjust their lives to the desert. If from the beginning you always believed that a ticket was only one-way, then you wouldn’t have to try so vainly to cling to the sand like an oyster to a rock.

You like movies of wild animals and of war because you find that the same old day, following the same old yesterday, is waiting for you as soon as you come out of the movie house… you even like the films that stick so close to reality they nearly give you a heart attack. Is anybody really foolish enough to go to the movies with a real gun, loaded with real bullets?

Beautiful scenery need not be sympathetic to man. His own viewpoint in considering the sand to be a rejection of the stationary state was not madness… a 1/8-mm. flow… a world where existence was a series of states. The beauty of sand, in other words, belonged to death. It was the beauty of death that ran through the magnificence of its ruins and its great power of destruction.

Needless to say, the enemy easily overpowered the guard in one fell swoop. In his fading consciousness he saw the enemy sweeping like the wind through the gates, over the walls, and into the buildings unhindered by anyone. No, it was the castle, not the enemy, that was really like the wind. The single guard, like a withered tree in the wilderness, had stood guarding an illusion.

It was not he who had satisfied his desires, but apparently someone quite different, someone who had borrowed his body. Sex, of its nature, was not defined by a single, individual body but by the species. An individual, finished with his squalid act, must return at once to his former self. Only the happy ones return to contentment Those who were sad return to despair. Those who were dying return to their deathbeds.

On that bed—with the other one—they had been a feeling man and woman, a watching man and woman; they had been a man who watched himself experiencing and a woman who watched herself experiencing; they had been a woman who watched a man watching himself and a man watching a woman watching herself… all reflected in counter-mirrors… the limitless consciousness of the sexual act.

Those who are in favor of free sex behave in much the same way. They are only giving a plausible rationalization to mutual rape. If you accept it as such, it can be enjoyed too. Freedom combined with constant worry—like a curtain that does not quite close—can only result in sexual psychopaths. There was no opportunity for his pitiable sex to doff its hat and relax.

There’s no obligation to go along with this to the extent—and the poor taste—of gift-wrapping sex. Let’s be freshly pressed every morning in sex too. In sex, once the coat’s been worn, it’s already old. You press out the wrinkles and it’s like new again. Once it’s new, it’s immediately old again…

like starving mice that repeatedly and frantically copulate as they migrate… like tuberculosis patients who are all seized by a kind of sex madness… like the king or ruler who dwells in a tower and devotes himself to establishing a harem… like the soldier for whom every moment is precious as he awaits the enemy attack and who spends those final moments masturbating…